A cyber-physical system is a system of collaborating computational elements that control physical entities. A special class of cyber-physical systems entails the deployment of teams of autonomous robots (unmanned vehicles) as well as human agents to accomplish certain critical missions. Within such a context, swarms of unmanned aerial or terrestrial vehicles are dispatched into the field to conduct a mission under human supervision or control, or in other instances jointly with human agents.
There is a broad spectrum of possible applications for cyber-physical systems. Examples include the use of a swarm of unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAV) for thermal imaging and remote sensing. UAV clusters have been also considered for 3D mapping, surveying, and other civil engineering tasks. Swarms of terrestrial robotic agents are also being increasingly considered for some time-critical field operations most notably for search and rescue and tactical missions. Another manifestation of team-based mobile cyber-physical systems includes task-oriented teams of paramedics and first responders during disasters or massively crowded events.
The availability of real-time video communications for those scenarios is indeed a powerful tool for collaborative decision-making and optimal mission execution. A paramount task for team-based mobile cyber-physical system is the joint planning and optimization of motion trajectories of the mobile devices. The timeliness of disseminating path planning and control signaling messages is crucial. Hence, end-to-end latency is a major performance metric. UAV-based cyber-physical systems may be quite bandwidth-hungry. This is true since real-time video communication is sought between the team members. As a special case of mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), team-based mobile cyber-physical systems undoubtedly push the envelope in terms of latency and throughput requirements.
Indeed, MANET is a well-established technical field that is at least a couple of decades old. MANET research space further evolved to cover vehicular and flying ad hoc networks (VANET and FANET respectively). Multihop packet routing has always been at the forefront of MANET, VANET, and FANET research challenges. Geographical routing (geo-routing) has been widely adopted in the context of MANET due to its resilience to mobility and network topological changes. As a matter of fact, geo-routing has been embraced by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) as a standard VANET routing technique for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS).